First Nvidia 4G modem validated on AT&T LTE network

Nvidia has reached an important milestone in Tegra development. A year ago Nvidia completed the $367 million acquisition of Icera, a modem manufacturing company that brought 3G and 4G into Nvidia’s portfolio.

Having a 3G /4G modem is very important as Qualcomm got a lot of traction with Snapdragon S4 MSM 8960 and its 28nm dual-core processor with LTE support. Yesterday it was announced that AT&T has validated Nvidia’s Icera 410 LTE modem for its network. This means that actual we should see the first Nvidia LTE products roll out in the latter part of the year, said Stan Boland, senior VP of Mobile communications at Nvidia.

Almost all LTE high-end phones that came out this year in the US market feature Qualcomm’s S4 inside, thanks to LTE capability and top notch performance. Nvidia wants a piece of this big market, as LTE becomes an irreplaceable feature for the high-end US market. Nvidia’s Icera 410 LTE multimode data modem chipset for tablets and clamshell device should help Nvidia catch up, but at a glance read it becomes quite clear that 410 LTE will go after notebooks, tablets and it doesn’t clearly indicates a capability of running in phones.

Nvidia Icera 410 LTE modem chipset supports LTE 4G/3G/2G multimode, it is based on multiple LTE bands on 700MHz and 800MHz it supports 6 on 10MHz LTE bandwidth and its peak data rate is 50Mbps, half of possible maximum of 100Mbps that you can see on some competing devices. The Icera 410 supports multiband 3G//HSPA+ cat 14 (21Mbps) and HSUPA Cat 6 5.7 Mbps. It is upgradable to 42Mbps with dual cell HSPA+.

It supports quad-band GPRS and EDGE, legacy modem technologies, supports voice and data as well as IceClear interference cancellation technologies. The Icera 410 is sampling now and if all goes well, should come as a real product before the end of this year. A more advanced version, the Icera 500 is also in the works, but Nvidia will not have integrated LTE until 2013.